New Release: Calloway, "Pen and Ink Witchcraft"

Indian peoples made some four hundred treaties with the United States
between the American Revolution and 1871, when Congress prohibited them.
They signed nine treaties with the Confederacy, as well as countless
others over the centuries with Spain, France, Britain, Mexico, the
Republic of Texas, Canada, and even Russia, not to mention individual
colonies and states. In retrospect, the treaties seem like well-ordered
steps on the path of dispossession and empire. The reality was far more
complicated.

In Pen and Ink Witchcraft, eminent Native
American historian Colin G. Calloway narrates the history of diplomacy
between North American Indians and their imperial adversaries,
particularly the United States. Treaties were cultural encounters and
human dramas,
each with its cast of characters and conflicting agendas. Many treaties,
he notes, involved not land, but trade, friendship, and the resolution
of disputes. Far from all being one-sided, they were negotiated on the
Indians' cultural and geographical terrain. When the Mohawks welcomed
Dutch traders in the early 1600s, they sealed a treaty of friendship
with a wampum belt with parallel rows of purple beads, representing the
parties traveling side-by-side, as equals, on the same river. But the
American republic increasingly turned treaty-making into a tool of
encroachment on Indian territory. Calloway traces this process by
focusing on the treaties of Fort Stanwix (1768), New Echota (1835), and
Medicine Lodge (1867), in addition to such events as the Peace of
Montreal in 1701 and the treaties
of Fort Laramie (1851 and 1868). His analysis demonstrates that native
leaders were hardly dupes. The records of negotiations, he writes, show
that "Indians frequently matched their colonizing counterparts in
diplomatic savvy and tried, literally, to hold their ground."

Each
treaty has its own story, Calloway writes, but together they tell a
rich and complicated tale of moments in American history when
civilizations collided.

A few blurbs:

"Indian treaties were major historical events, and today they are still important sources of legal rights. Pen and Ink Witchcraft is a masterful overview of the complex processes by which these treaties were created." --Stuart Banner, author of How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier

"This extraordinary analysis of Indian treaties and treaty-making
reveals the complexity and objectives of the United States government
in negotiating nearly 400 ratified agreements. In a book wide in
scope--addressing political ceremony, kinship alliances, council
meetings, native law, oratorical power, gift-giving diplomacy, and
sovereignty--Colin Calloway has produced a masterpiece for Indian
treaties to be understood by everyone. This leading scholar of Indian
history explains the historical development of Native American legal
rights today." --Donald L. Fixico, editor of Treaties with American Indians: An Encyclopedia of Rights, Conflicts, and Sovereignty